How do we get people to think?

April 13, 2013 by davidmarquet

116 thought leaders participated in a one-hour tweet chat organized by #LeadWithGiants on 29 April 2013. The topic of the chat was “How do we get people to think?” Cooperating with @DanvForbes, we came up with these 10 questions to seed the “conversation.

Why is employee engagement so low in the workplace today?

Why are employees not thinking and not leading?

If employees aren’t thinking, what ARE they doing?

How would you describe the organizational culture that encourages thinking?

How do we get people to think?

What observables are there when people are thinking?

Can we tell when people are thinking by looking at them?

What is is the biggest impediment to divesting decision making power to lower and lower levels in the organization?

When you think about a “leaders everywhere” organization, what reservations do you have?

How do we get people to think longer term?

The chat generated 1200 tweets and 160 pages of comments when I cut and pasted them to a word document. The full transcript is here.

I looked for some overall themes to distill the collective thinking that happened. I decided to create this wordle. If you haven’t seen one before, the greater the frequency use of the word the bigger it is. It is subject to distortion because I had to decide which common words to exclude. Some where obvious, like “tweetchat.” I also decided to exclude “leader, leadership, leaders, employees, employee” and similar words that seemed to be the subject of what we were talking about and needed to be included by necessity.